South Dakota Trip

After a week being home from our vacation to South Dakota, I'm just now posting about it. I still don't have pictures ready to post, but I will post them when Dustin is done down converting them. We were fortunate enough to have been able to borrow Nate's camera which is a professional grade digital camera so the pictures are very large and intricate.

Anyway, we left early Monday the 10th at 3am. We took I-74 through Illinois and then got on I-80 and took that through Iowa. We then went straight north to South Dakota. South Dakota is probably the longest state to drive through and there are no speed limit signs. So keeping that in mind my wonderful husband who wanted to drive most of the way ended up getting a real heavy foot and got pulled over by the ONLY police officer we saw in South Dakota on that stretch of road.

When we pulled into Rapid City, it seriously felt like home. I want to go back. It was a city of about 55,000 and amazingly at rush hour there were hardly any cars on the road! The scenery was so amazing. I cannot even describe. This state is definitely worth a trip back, that's for sure. We stayed on Ellsworth Air Force Base which allowed us to stay in an upscale Hotel type room for cheap. We saw Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Deadwood, Custer, and many other things in Rapid City. If any of you've ever seen the show Deadwood from HBO, we went to that same town where the Gold Rush folks like Calamaty Jane and Wild Bill Hickcock lived.

We decided to leave Rapid City and head to Wyoming on Thursday. So we drove to see Devil's Tower which was hidden by a lot of clouds and rain. It was a crazy sight, that's for sure. We then drove straight south and ended up in Sundance, Wyoming and were starving. We stopped at a Cafe that was hopping. The locals looked at us like a sore thumb, but we sat at the little bar next to some locals and started talking. Dustin order this thing called a Paco. It was a deep fat fried taco. The breading was sweet like a donut but still afforded to taste great with taco meat inside. I had homemade broccoli and cheese soup and a salad.

Once filled up with local's chatter and great home cookin, we headed through to Nebraska. I saw my first tumbleweeds and tried to take pictures of it. There is a picture I took of the red roads in the west because they make their roads with a mixture of clay instead of limestone like we do. After an exhausting 8 hour drive we stopped in Omaha, Nebraska and stayed at Offutt Air Force Base. It was HUGE and we are definitely going back. Air Force Two was sitting on the tarmac and I wasn't allowed to take pictures because it is illegal to take pictures unless the planes are in the air.

We then drove the rest of the way home and got home Saturday morning at around midnight. We had such a blast and will definitely take more trips like this in the future. Pictures will be posted at some future date when I can get Dustin get them resized.